This is a long one, so digressions are marked in red, and the red becomes brighter the more irrelevant the digression becomes. If you're only interested in What Happened, stick to the black.
Yesterday, I art-ed all morning and posted my swaps. I suffered a fashion disaster, by attempting a high-up pony, and ended up looked uncomfortably like the 90s had come to stay. In retrospect, this was to be the tone of the day. We had lunch, and had plans to go out shopping in Central for a new card holder for my ATCs. But all the reasonable tube lines were down, so we decided to travel west instead – heading to Gunnersbury Park museum, a restored regency mansion. I left my pocketwatch at home.
We (that is, Calypso and I. Should probably start qualifying pronouns now in case they get wobbly) took a bus to Acton, and I bought a new rucksack at the museum. It was £5 reduced from £13, and really nice quality – lots of pockets. My old one was shedding plastic flakes every time I used it. From there, we walked down to Gunnersbury – where the sun god lives. It’s a walk I’ve done three times, and each time been shocked by the heat. The light beats down the only routes. Luckily, I’d come prepared with a hat and water, but it was still a relief to arrive at the park and crash under the trees.
I tried getting into a habit of going to the park across the road, but it is too unpleasant. Too many people using it for sports, and the moment you sit down you get covered in some of the nastiest insects I have ever seen. This had few insects, and satisfying shade. We watched clouds, complete with quirky Indie accents; then we did a cloud oracle. I'm interested in divination at present, and the way it reveals not so much the future as the subconscious. I saw instructions for making a "random oracle" - a bag of any old items, from which one is drawn and interpreted - and the idea amused me: it takes divination as reading meaning into nonsense to its natural conclusion. Earlier this week, we used a page of Stylist featuring This Season's 20 Must Have Products. After crashing for a time, we went into the museum – where a a pissed-off attendant told us they were soon closing. The front room was notable for a Auton-gentleman with a cravat, and a book on Edwardian Murders.
I ambled on to work out the extent of the museum, as we'd run out of time to explore it fully. Down a short corridor and to the left was the cart room - reminding me of the Folk Museum. But I was totally distracted by the windows, three of them down one wall, and the design of the door, and in general the room's shape and situation. Because it reminded me strongly of Mortimer's childhood - we can call it home. Although it never was, not really. That house had always had these characteristically tall, shuttered windows, and I'd been sure they were in period - but was too certain they were there to change them. I went into the next room, and this didn't feel so familiar, but with some trepidation I peered between the shutters and experienced the most horrible sensation - because I had known what the view must be like, because I've seen the view from that window before. I moved into the third room of the corridor. And this was unpleasant because, but for the orientation (this room was on the front of the house, not the back), it could have been his father's study - the original owner of my confusingly engraved pocket watch. Fireplace and all.
Now, every time I go to old houses I think about him, and maybe find the odd artifact of a design I like - but never anything like this. I felt like he was walking over my grave - or I over his.
If you haven't been keeping up, he was the roleplay character who never really went away. I don't want to focus on this too much, partly because I'll go on for hours, and partly because it gets into the Nature Of Creation. Nevertheless, because I "stayed in contact" with him, I've always been interested by what he is to me and vice versa.
How much of ourselves do we put into characters? Consciously, I wrote him as alien to myself. But now I wonder if my subconscious didn't write him with more care. Many of his defects and qualities, I can now identify with personally - and in some ways, my life has begun to mimick his history. What is this? Was it indeed the subconscious, and those qualities of mine I accidentally gave him have affected my life as it did his? There are some things about myself which I could not have known age 13 - an example would be our characteristic melancholia on consuming alchohol. Is it habit - I spent a lot of time "playing" him, something like three years at least. You can't spend that amount of time thinking in a certain manner without it brushing off. And maybe, then, things like his reaction to alchohol subconsciously informed mine. Is he the name I give to certain aspects of my personality, like a stage persona or a pen name - or a dark side, to disassociate my more unpleasant/unwanted characteristics by blaming them, or at least attributing them, to Someone Else. Or is he my ideal form? And certainly, at times I would like to be a gentleman (but is that habit, as mentioned above?)
Is it supernatural? Well, if we're going to be scientific about this, we should at least consider the silly options too. I do feel my brain and body shift, and my tone and mannerisms change - and this is no a conscious act. I'm not the only person to exhibit this sort of behavior: the Otherkin, for example, believe they are animals trapped in human form, and that they can feel, say, a tail and experience a shift between their human and "true" selves. There are even the Otakukin who, closer to what I am experiencing, believe they have the souls of certain Anime characters. Or people with past lives - I imagine, if you took me to a past life specialist this would be their explaination, and in my research on the topic they have used similar language to me. Certain groups might also suggest demonic posession.
I've more sympathy with the Otherkin than the past life folk, and I mention them because it's clear that a certain combo of imagination and (perhaps) discomfort with the real world regularly produces the effects I am describing. And because there is a fatal lack of rigour and scepticism in the New Age community, the phenomenon has never been properly studied. At present, I have got around to thinking that we are the same person, same starting stats, who have experienced different lives. In particular, he never had friends - while I have had marvellous ones in abundance; maybe also a caring, interested family. Perhaps because of all this, he has a fatal lack of empathy, whereas I have rather too much. But this conclusion will doubtless change again, as it always has.
This story, written predominantly when I was 13/14 and packed with youthful flaws, constantly amazes me with its accuracy - often when I least expect it. Some of the most vivid events of M's life are scattered and blurry, and often make no damn sense even though they are narratively the most important scenes to get straight. This was recently explained to me in a movie violence textbook, by a criminal psychologist talking about murder. Apparently, serial killers pre-plan in detail and keep souveneers because the sensation of killing doesn't last, and memory is instantly fallible afterwards. This explains a lot. And indeed, he very closely matches wikipedia's description of sociopath - he gets a 30/40 score (at least) on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (He doesn't have a Grandiose Sense of Self Worth, and only appears to be Emotionally Shallow. I can't comment on his early life, and can't work out what Revocation of Conditional Release means.) The book on psychopathy offers a very familiar conclusion:
Anyway, believe what you like. To my mind, there is not much separating something happening, and one's total belief that something is happening. It doesn't hurt anyone, so far as I can tell, and
perhaps it's even helping by keeping me keener to be good.
It's entirely possible I've picked all these things up by osmosis; but this was different, weird. Few films and books concentrate on the actual layout of houses in enough detail. Surely. It's also possible that once I noticed a few synchronicities, my mind was actively hunting for more - and obviously found them.
When the museum closed, I dragged Calypso around the house to have a closer look at that fateful view. Because climax of the tale occurs on the lawn at the back, so it was easy to find the right window. And there was arguably nothing more important than sitting uncomfortably in the long dining room at the back, glancing by chance through those windows – and catching sight of ghosts on the lawn – than dashing through the double shutters, walking over the stone terrace, down the grassy slope and finding the worst thing in the world at the bottom – because I've done this walk before, first in my imagination, and then again every time I've revised a script or story draft, I'm as familiar with it in my mind as the daily commute. So inevitably, I set off in the right direction and felt heavy and liberated all at once, queasy and released – like white sunlight would overwhelm my mind – and ran. I could have been anyone or anywhere: two parts of time which should never have touched.
And I’m not overreacting, I’m truly not, because I’ve been looking for this house most
of my life and never expected to find it. Nobody should be confronted with exploring their mental landscape in the flesh. This house should not have been real, and I’m half convinced that it wasn’t – or my memories of M’s house shifted to match it. But I still have those sketches, and to keep things in perspective, there are as many discrepancies as accuracies: six big rooms instead of four; different front, different lobby. And mercifully, the lake was not where it should have been (it was about 20 degrees to the left, slightly too far back and had been bricked in – but it would have been the right shape)
And I feel it will change to accomodate the things I’ve learnt. Because, like the instances above where my mind is a black hole because his is, I’ve never really been satisfied with his description of the house – like working out where the servant’s quarters are, because M never cared to be aware of them. Using the Gunnersbury layout, I can correct such mistakes. The back of the house looked correct in its length, even though from the inside there should only have been 8 windows instead of about 12 meaning there must be an extra room (and now I think of it, there was always a salon/parlour, the location of which I was never sure of because it wasn’t very important. I mean, I can think of six ground floor rooms – but apart from the two important ones, never worked out where the other four definitely fitted.)
After that, the day just became increasingly weird. Nostalgia came bubbling up, like the curse it is. We explored the rest of the park and found the boating lake, the temple, the fantastic orangery. We found a building from 1969, covered in carved graffiti from people with older names, like Ken and Dennis. And spray graffiti reading “Its going to start somewhere”, which seemed apt. We took two busses back, and I came home, buzzing to write – and then spent a long, long, long time on sociology websites. There’s only so much excitement I can take in a day.
We are going back. With cameras. Today is the 17th of June, close to the day it ended, and now I am itching to get to my old diaries and see how close we came.
Yesterday, I art-ed all morning and posted my swaps. I suffered a fashion disaster, by attempting a high-up pony, and ended up looked uncomfortably like the 90s had come to stay. In retrospect, this was to be the tone of the day. We had lunch, and had plans to go out shopping in Central for a new card holder for my ATCs. But all the reasonable tube lines were down, so we decided to travel west instead – heading to Gunnersbury Park museum, a restored regency mansion. I left my pocketwatch at home.
We (that is, Calypso and I. Should probably start qualifying pronouns now in case they get wobbly) took a bus to Acton, and I bought a new rucksack at the museum. It was £5 reduced from £13, and really nice quality – lots of pockets. My old one was shedding plastic flakes every time I used it. From there, we walked down to Gunnersbury – where the sun god lives. It’s a walk I’ve done three times, and each time been shocked by the heat. The light beats down the only routes. Luckily, I’d come prepared with a hat and water, but it was still a relief to arrive at the park and crash under the trees.
I tried getting into a habit of going to the park across the road, but it is too unpleasant. Too many people using it for sports, and the moment you sit down you get covered in some of the nastiest insects I have ever seen. This had few insects, and satisfying shade. We watched clouds, complete with quirky Indie accents; then we did a cloud oracle. I'm interested in divination at present, and the way it reveals not so much the future as the subconscious. I saw instructions for making a "random oracle" - a bag of any old items, from which one is drawn and interpreted - and the idea amused me: it takes divination as reading meaning into nonsense to its natural conclusion. Earlier this week, we used a page of Stylist featuring This Season's 20 Must Have Products. After crashing for a time, we went into the museum – where a a pissed-off attendant told us they were soon closing. The front room was notable for a Auton-gentleman with a cravat, and a book on Edwardian Murders.
I ambled on to work out the extent of the museum, as we'd run out of time to explore it fully. Down a short corridor and to the left was the cart room - reminding me of the Folk Museum. But I was totally distracted by the windows, three of them down one wall, and the design of the door, and in general the room's shape and situation. Because it reminded me strongly of Mortimer's childhood - we can call it home. Although it never was, not really. That house had always had these characteristically tall, shuttered windows, and I'd been sure they were in period - but was too certain they were there to change them. I went into the next room, and this didn't feel so familiar, but with some trepidation I peered between the shutters and experienced the most horrible sensation - because I had known what the view must be like, because I've seen the view from that window before. I moved into the third room of the corridor. And this was unpleasant because, but for the orientation (this room was on the front of the house, not the back), it could have been his father's study - the original owner of my confusingly engraved pocket watch. Fireplace and all.
Now, every time I go to old houses I think about him, and maybe find the odd artifact of a design I like - but never anything like this. I felt like he was walking over my grave - or I over his.
If you haven't been keeping up, he was the roleplay character who never really went away. I don't want to focus on this too much, partly because I'll go on for hours, and partly because it gets into the Nature Of Creation. Nevertheless, because I "stayed in contact" with him, I've always been interested by what he is to me and vice versa.
How much of ourselves do we put into characters? Consciously, I wrote him as alien to myself. But now I wonder if my subconscious didn't write him with more care. Many of his defects and qualities, I can now identify with personally - and in some ways, my life has begun to mimick his history. What is this? Was it indeed the subconscious, and those qualities of mine I accidentally gave him have affected my life as it did his? There are some things about myself which I could not have known age 13 - an example would be our characteristic melancholia on consuming alchohol. Is it habit - I spent a lot of time "playing" him, something like three years at least. You can't spend that amount of time thinking in a certain manner without it brushing off. And maybe, then, things like his reaction to alchohol subconsciously informed mine. Is he the name I give to certain aspects of my personality, like a stage persona or a pen name - or a dark side, to disassociate my more unpleasant/unwanted characteristics by blaming them, or at least attributing them, to Someone Else. Or is he my ideal form? And certainly, at times I would like to be a gentleman (but is that habit, as mentioned above?)
Is it supernatural? Well, if we're going to be scientific about this, we should at least consider the silly options too. I do feel my brain and body shift, and my tone and mannerisms change - and this is no a conscious act. I'm not the only person to exhibit this sort of behavior: the Otherkin, for example, believe they are animals trapped in human form, and that they can feel, say, a tail and experience a shift between their human and "true" selves. There are even the Otakukin who, closer to what I am experiencing, believe they have the souls of certain Anime characters. Or people with past lives - I imagine, if you took me to a past life specialist this would be their explaination, and in my research on the topic they have used similar language to me. Certain groups might also suggest demonic posession.
I've more sympathy with the Otherkin than the past life folk, and I mention them because it's clear that a certain combo of imagination and (perhaps) discomfort with the real world regularly produces the effects I am describing. And because there is a fatal lack of rigour and scepticism in the New Age community, the phenomenon has never been properly studied. At present, I have got around to thinking that we are the same person, same starting stats, who have experienced different lives. In particular, he never had friends - while I have had marvellous ones in abundance; maybe also a caring, interested family. Perhaps because of all this, he has a fatal lack of empathy, whereas I have rather too much. But this conclusion will doubtless change again, as it always has.
This story, written predominantly when I was 13/14 and packed with youthful flaws, constantly amazes me with its accuracy - often when I least expect it. Some of the most vivid events of M's life are scattered and blurry, and often make no damn sense even though they are narratively the most important scenes to get straight. This was recently explained to me in a movie violence textbook, by a criminal psychologist talking about murder. Apparently, serial killers pre-plan in detail and keep souveneers because the sensation of killing doesn't last, and memory is instantly fallible afterwards. This explains a lot. And indeed, he very closely matches wikipedia's description of sociopath - he gets a 30/40 score (at least) on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (He doesn't have a Grandiose Sense of Self Worth, and only appears to be Emotionally Shallow. I can't comment on his early life, and can't work out what Revocation of Conditional Release means.) The book on psychopathy offers a very familiar conclusion:
Cleckley describes the psychopathic person as outwardly a perfect mimic of a normally functioning person, able to mask or disguise the fundamental lack of internal personality structure, an internal chaos that results in repeatedly purposeful destructive behavior, often more self-destructive than destructive to others. Despite the seemingly sincere, intelligent, even charming external presentation, internally the psychopathic person does not have the ability to experience genuine emotions.And I could go on; apparently, psychopaths have a particularly intense stare (and I have letters from the game attesting to this). Often, psychopaths are so convincing that solid evidence of their deceptions cannot convince others of anything but their innocence - he's actually experienced this on more than one occasion, and it's always been amusing. One of the most interesting things I have discovered is how far my experiences of his life are skewed by how he sees himself. At the time, I was playing him as a romantic hero. With perspective, I'm now realising how far he plays himself as a romantic hero. And sometimes, other people's behavior makes me think yes, the behavior of the minor characters is realistic. Add into that accidentally accurate details of London's layout, including the instinctive understanding that the south bank was scummy and warehouse-ridden; burning down Newgate Gaol and later discovering it had indeed been burned down historically, in almost the same year; knowing how to wield a regency gun before being instructed; little jolts like these make me think there is more to this than fancy.
Anyway, believe what you like. To my mind, there is not much separating something happening, and one's total belief that something is happening. It doesn't hurt anyone, so far as I can tell, and
perhaps it's even helping by keeping me keener to be good.
It's entirely possible I've picked all these things up by osmosis; but this was different, weird. Few films and books concentrate on the actual layout of houses in enough detail. Surely. It's also possible that once I noticed a few synchronicities, my mind was actively hunting for more - and obviously found them.
When the museum closed, I dragged Calypso around the house to have a closer look at that fateful view. Because climax of the tale occurs on the lawn at the back, so it was easy to find the right window. And there was arguably nothing more important than sitting uncomfortably in the long dining room at the back, glancing by chance through those windows – and catching sight of ghosts on the lawn – than dashing through the double shutters, walking over the stone terrace, down the grassy slope and finding the worst thing in the world at the bottom – because I've done this walk before, first in my imagination, and then again every time I've revised a script or story draft, I'm as familiar with it in my mind as the daily commute. So inevitably, I set off in the right direction and felt heavy and liberated all at once, queasy and released – like white sunlight would overwhelm my mind – and ran. I could have been anyone or anywhere: two parts of time which should never have touched.
And I’m not overreacting, I’m truly not, because I’ve been looking for this house most
of my life and never expected to find it. Nobody should be confronted with exploring their mental landscape in the flesh. This house should not have been real, and I’m half convinced that it wasn’t – or my memories of M’s house shifted to match it. But I still have those sketches, and to keep things in perspective, there are as many discrepancies as accuracies: six big rooms instead of four; different front, different lobby. And mercifully, the lake was not where it should have been (it was about 20 degrees to the left, slightly too far back and had been bricked in – but it would have been the right shape)
And I feel it will change to accomodate the things I’ve learnt. Because, like the instances above where my mind is a black hole because his is, I’ve never really been satisfied with his description of the house – like working out where the servant’s quarters are, because M never cared to be aware of them. Using the Gunnersbury layout, I can correct such mistakes. The back of the house looked correct in its length, even though from the inside there should only have been 8 windows instead of about 12 meaning there must be an extra room (and now I think of it, there was always a salon/parlour, the location of which I was never sure of because it wasn’t very important. I mean, I can think of six ground floor rooms – but apart from the two important ones, never worked out where the other four definitely fitted.)
After that, the day just became increasingly weird. Nostalgia came bubbling up, like the curse it is. We explored the rest of the park and found the boating lake, the temple, the fantastic orangery. We found a building from 1969, covered in carved graffiti from people with older names, like Ken and Dennis. And spray graffiti reading “Its going to start somewhere”, which seemed apt. We took two busses back, and I came home, buzzing to write – and then spent a long, long, long time on sociology websites. There’s only so much excitement I can take in a day.
We are going back. With cameras. Today is the 17th of June, close to the day it ended, and now I am itching to get to my old diaries and see how close we came.
